


I found the man who created me and tore him limb from limb

by jasontoddwashere



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alternate Origin Story, Canon-Typical Violence, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fix-It, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25496686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jasontoddwashere/pseuds/jasontoddwashere
Summary: Fix-it for Laura’s comic book origin. Extremely non-canon compliant, heavily inspired by X-Men: Evolution.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

Brushing the long, wild branches sprouting in front of the window aside, Laura cautiously peers into one of the many rooms inside Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Three girls are chasing each other with pillows in what appears to be a shared bedroom of sorts. A woman with burnished red hair opens their door and gently tells them to quiet down. She doesn't scream or say it with anger. In fact, she’s smiling, fighting off laughter. 

Resentment curls up inside of Laura's chest. It’s a familiar feeling. Not even her biological mother had looked at her like this woman looked at her students. She fleetingly wonders if she just came to the door, told the truth, and started attending the school, if she and the rest of the staff could grow to care about Laura the way she obviously cared about the other kids here. The possibility of a normal life rears its ugly head, makes her reconsider what she is about to do. 

She turns away from the window. It’s a fantasy she’s been deluding herself with since she left the facility. A family. A normal life. Someone to care for her, like parents did in movies. Realistically, she knows there’s no way to spin her story that would make her the sympathetic figure. She thought back to all the times she could have killed her handlers, the scientists, and other staff at the facility and escaped. Why hadn’t she? She couldn’t come up with a plausible excuse. It makes no sense to her now. But it’d been done and she couldn’t go back and change it. Agonizing over it surely wouldn’t drop a do over in her lap, no matter how much she wanted it to. Laura knew there was only one way this could end. 

She creeps around to the other side of the school and peers into another, larger, window. The lights are on inside and two young women and a man are sitting together at a table. There are plastic playing cards spread out in each of their palms. Laura thinks they must be friends, because one of the girls has her arms around the both of them and they’re all laughing. The corners of their eyes crinkle softly, pleasantly, and their faces flush with the expression. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt like that. If she ever had. 

Was this what jealousy felt like? Anger was an emotion so familiar to her it felt like her oldest friend. But she had never been envious before. She didn’t know how to be. Now, she wanted nothing more than to crash through the window and strangle them. Not because they’d done anything to warrant it but because they had all the wonderful things she did not. 

She has to push the unfamiliar emotion from her mind before she can proceed to the next side of the building, reminding herself that she has to stay focused. They may look harmless and happy now, but she can’t allow them to catch her off guard. 

In another window, a man with glasses is sitting in a large office chair, bent over piles of paperwork spread out over his desk. A large digital clock displays the time and date, February 18th, at the edge of the desk. 

Scott, she thinks he’s called, raises his head as a woman with stark white hair enters the open door. She’s carrying a cup in her hands that she places beside the clock for him without a word. It’s a thoughtful gesture. Caring, she thinks, is an appropriate description for it. Laura watches her exit the room and darts over to the next window to keep up with her. Her name is Storm. She controls the weather. That’s all Laura knows about her. 

In the next room, she gently examines the leaves of a potted plant, tipping water into the pot from a glass cup. She looks nice, gentle, and calm, and more doubts creep into Laura’s head. She has to physically shake herself, as if she might dislodge them from her brain, before turning to the next window. Using the brick window sill as a foothold, she grasps the identical window sill above her with both hands, and scales the building. 

In a room on the second floor, three girls are sitting on a large bed, watching television. Their hair is almost white too, but not quite as shocking as Storm’s. The television casts an eerie glow upon their faces, which Laura struggles to tell apart. She has to strain to find a fraction of a difference between them and even then she doubts what she’s seeing with her own eyes. Every so often, their eyes will glow softly and they’ll exchange sly glances, but they never once open their mouths to speak. Laura springs onto another window sill, feeling unnerved.  _ What an odd bunch, _ she thinks. 

On the third floor there is something she recognizes as a pool table. She can tell because the top is green and it has pockets cut out of the edges. A girl with blue hair and some boy are fighting, but not in earnest. They seem to be playing some kind of game, their pool cues cast aside. And then, as if for no reason, they press their lips together. Laura watches with a visceral kind of shock. Children her own age could be so strange sometimes. She doesn’t know why she feels so disgusted, just makes a face to herself, and simply jumps back down onto the lawn. 

Watching these heroes in such a mundane setting felt like a fever dream. All their exploits, and this is what they got to come home to every night. How… boring it all was. How ordinary. And Laura couldn’t even relate to that. Even among mutants and superheroes, she had nothing in common with anyone.

Maybe if she died, this deep, persistent loneliness would finally dissipate. Maybe she’d finally feel some sense of peace. As she turns these thoughts over in her head, she settles into some form of comfort with her decision. It would not be painless or very pretty but what she was about to do was by far the most merciful, humane thing she’d ever do. 

For the next hour, she watches the lights in each window go out one by one, swallowed by darkness. The sun has already set and the chirp of crickets and other bugs fills the air like a shrill song. She knew it was wishful thinking to have everyone asleep. The house was too full of people for that to happen. But when she feels satisfied that most of the students, at least, seem to be in bed, she approaches the front door, looking down at herself to make sure her clothes weren’t stained or ripped in a suspicious way, before ringing the doorbell. 

In the dull light of a yellow porch lamp, she anxiously listens to a pair of footsteps on the other side of the door get closer and closer. 

* * *

Logan wakes up in the middle of the afternoon, sweating, despite the fact that it’s still technically winter. Their bed is empty. Jean and Scott are already up for classes by now. 

The nice thing about being the groundskeeper and being able to see in the dark is that Logan can work whenever he wants. He used to struggle to sleep through a whole night because of nightmares that had him clawing his way out of his sheets. He was still restless every now and again but the years had faded and softened all his memories, even the truly horrible ones. 

He checks his cell phone, first thing, to see if he has any missed messages. The lock screen tells him that it’s January 31st, 3:30pm, and that he has five missed calls from Matt Murdoch.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he rolls his eyes. Kids and their phones. He dials the number back. It only rings once before Matt picks up.

“Logan?”

“Hey, Matt, what’s going on?”

“Has Pete talked to you?” He asks in a low voice.

“Peter? No, why?”

“I don’t want to alarm you...”

“Well, there’s very little that can surprise me these days, so might as well get on with it.”

“Have you been to New York in the past few months?”

“No?”

“A month ago some girl walked into a nightclub and stabbed a man to death. The blade she used was sharp enough to cut through his entire body. Bones and all. Since then, dozens of new bodies have been popping up in the Hudson and on the street every week. All of them cut down to the bone.”

“And?” 

He laughs. Is Matt really calling for his expertise on cutting people to shreds?

“Logan, is it possible you have a sibling? Or daughter?”

“Excuse me?”

“She left DNA at the scene. Nick ran it through the system to see if it matched any known criminals. When he did, you came up.”

Logan feels his brain go fuzzy. He begins to doubt himself, old fears creeping in. Maybe he was in New York. Maybe he did kill someone and he just doesn’t know it. 

“Nick doesn’t think it’s you. The match was only partial. Over 50% of your DNA is shared, but some of it doesn’t match yours at all, and all of the witnesses say it was a girl.”

Logan sighs heavily, “Oh, god dammit, what do you want me to do?”

There’s always a catch with these things. Always someone new knocking at his door, asking for their pound of flesh. But Matt isn’t that kind of man, he tries to tell himself. He wants to trust that Matt wouldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to. But he lost the ability to convince himself of anything like that long ago. The good ones are too few and far between for him to genuinely believe that sentiment.

“Nick won’t tell me anything but I have a feeling there’s something else going on. How could someone share over 50% of your DNA? It doesn’t make sense,” there is a hint of urgency in his voice that makes Logan inclined to believe him. 

Strangely, as he processes the deluge of information, he realizes he doesn’t feel worried or anxious. Either way, he knows exactly how this will go. It will either be nothing and he’ll move on with his life. Or… 

“Whatever it is, if it has something to do with me, you and I both know Nick will come and find me. He always does.”

* * *

Laura arrives in New York City on New Years Eve. The city is nothing short of bright and brilliant. On every street, in every building, there is something that catches her eye. Her second night in the city, she can hear the chant of people counting down in the streets. She doesn’t realize what they’re counting for until three days later. She sees a glittering advertisement for some New Years drink being torn down and she can guess the rest from there. 

Laura has never celebrated a holiday in her life. She sifts through books at the library, trying to memorize them all, mesmerized that there were so many days out of the year to celebrate. She discovers other books and movies while she’s there too. She bites her nails through  _ Frankenstein, Shane, _ and  _ Emma _ , laughs through  _ The Wizard of Oz, _ and is hypnotized by  _ Cinderella _ . These feelings are new, but not uncomfortable. Through the lense of these TV shows, books, and films she feels like she is beginning to understand the world just a little bit better. She is beginning to understand  _ people _ better. 

She sleeps under the shrubs in Central Park at first. The soft sounds of birds at night or rain hitting leaves lulls her into a peaceful sleep. She has no money— and she’s learned that everything costs money— so she steals food from restaurants or stores. For a time, she finds herself satisfied with this life. It is lonely, she doesn’t have any friends or companionship, and she is often very bored. But she is happier than she’d been in the facility. A low standard, but a standard nonetheless.

One night, that changes. It’s storming and she finds herself unable to sleep, the low rumbling of thunder keeping her awake. There’s something else too. Someone struggling, screaming maybe? It’s hard to make out with all the other noises but it’s there. That, she’s sure of. She rolls out from underneath the bush she was huddled under and stalks through the foliage. The voices are closer now and through the darkness and branches of trees, she can see someone struggling with a girl. She must be Laura’s age. Her youth and something else, probably fear, are painted clear as day across her face. A tall, dark figure clad in a hoodie and jeans has her by the wrists. They throw her into the trunk of a car. Laura feels frozen as she watches them slam the door shut and drive off. She commits the license plate to memory, thinks she’ll need it later for something. 

In hindsight, her awe and wonder about the city has been a mistake. She soon notices that every street she turns down is lined with missing children’s posters and begins to wonder where they’ve all gone. How does someone just vanish? How do  _ so many _ people vanish all at once? She discovers the answer is usually that they don’t; they’re taken. It makes her see violent, angry red. She spends some time stewing in her rage, unable to understand why her mother wanted her out here if this was all the world had to offer. Missing children, missing friends, sisters, mothers, cousins. 

Inevitably, the girl from that night shows up on another missing person’s poster. Guilt attaches itself to Laura like a shadow. She’d watched her be thrown into the back of a car and had done nothing. This was her fault, all her fault. Did she deserve to be free if she couldn’t act appropriately in the face of something so obviously wrong? Never in her life had she failed to act. It would have been a death sentence to freeze or run in the facility. But that was when her sole motivation had been avoiding punishment. Her world had changed since then. What would be her motivation now that she was no longer under the control of Kimura and Dr. Rice?

She must make a decision. In the facility, they were all made for her. Out here, she’s her own handler. She creates her own mission. 

The car is easy to find. The girl, even easier, her scent and the pitch of her voice playing on loop inside Laura’s brain. Laura figures she’s already killed so many people that a few more don’t change anything. And she’d made the decision to kill them this time. For the first time in her whole life. It was exhilarating, though perhaps a bit twisted. 

Human traffickers, they’re called. They sell people. She’d naively believed that things like that didn’t– couldn’t– happen out here and that all people were free beyond the walls of her facility. How dumb she’d been. 

The men she kills are like poor, gaudy impressions of her handlers, spectors reminding her of the facility once more. For every one of them she cuts through, it’s settling a score with one of the hundreds of staff members who had sat by and watched her be tormented her whole life. 

Killing does nothing to quell the rage slowly building inside her. In fact, it’s like gasoline to a fire. When she’s mad, the heavy, uncomfortable feeling nestled just under her ribs burns away. It provides a temporary reprieve from the static numbness she feels all over her body, like when a limb falls asleep. She thinks she ought to be sad or upset. When she lies down under the bushes in Central Park at night she tries to force herself to cry. The tears don’t come as readily as they did the day her mother had died. 

The first week of February, Laura butchers so many of them that all serious criminal activity screeches to a standstill for a couple of nights. A group of weird men in masks chasing her through the streets isn’t even close to what it’ll take to stop her. Laura knows she’ll have to leave the city eventually. She’s attracted too much attention to herself to stay. But for now she has time, so she’ll keep doing what she’s best at. 

* * *

She doesn’t expect S.H.I.E.L.D. to have a folder on her already. It’s not like she’d been particularly surreptitious about her activities in New York but she’d seen the news. No one knew enough about her to start building a file. 

They’re calling her, “FNU LNU.” It’s not even close to any of the names she’s been called by, not even aliases she’d taken on missions. She wonders where they got it. 

The only thing they have on her is a picture of a genetic sample, a very blurry photo of her in a nightclub ripped from a security camera, and a brief description of the murders she’d committed. It seems premature and incomplete. It’s nothing compared to the files her facility had kept.

But she’s not here to learn about herself. It’s the X-Men she’s interested in. And the files certainly deliver in that regard. The first thing she’s struck by is just how many of them there are. They seem to be broken up into smaller teams, operating all over the world, but all of them consider themselves an X-Man or seem to have worked with them at some point. No matter their skills or background they seem united under one cause: defending mutants.

Their files are thorough. Their locations, the different teams and their members, their bases of operation, and each individual's power sets are painstakingly outlined in the vast collection of files. Maybe it’s naive of her to think she could tell just from appearance, but as she goes down the list, each person looks less threatening than the last. She’s surprised that some of them are even considered threats according to the database. And according to the database,  _ many _ of them are. 

When she discovers her father is labeled a threat, it doesn’t surprise her. He does have her mutation, after all. Everything else listed in the profile does. According to them, he was born in Canada, in what is presumed to be the Northwestern Territories, in the mid-1800s, but there’s no exact location or birthdate. Laura feels confused at the realization that her father is hundreds of years old. 

“Enhanced healing and regeneration make him nearly impossible to kill. Several theories for how to successfully kill him have been proposed, but none tested. Aging seems to have stopped in his early thirties, but the adamantium implantations have begun to slow the healing process and age him once again.”

There are photos attached at the bottom of the page, some in black and white, and very grainy. In one, her father has a long beard and stands next to several men in button up shirts and dated caps. They’re holding shovels and are covered in grime from head to toe. In another, he’s got on a brightly patterned shirt that's open at the collar, exposing a very hairy chest. His beard is shorter and he has sideburns in this photo. He's standing next to a beautiful woman with hair that looks like one giant, perfect circle. The year 1917 is scrawled in messy, black ink at the bottom of one picture of him alone, facing the camera, dressed in some kind of uniform. He almost looks sad in that one, but Laura can’t put a finger on why. 

She continues to scroll through the very long account of his life. He’s served in several wars, been to prison a couple of times for various reasons, has a long list of “known partners,” and has apparently been married more than once. He’s lived in Japan, America, Canada, and even the Arctic. There’s very little detailed information about his early life, and, for some reason his birth name is listed as James. The more she reads, the more questions she has. 

Most of it is interesting but ultimately useless information. It’s nice to know about her father, and by extension herself, but that’s all it is.

What really catches Laura’s eye is something called Weapon X. It makes her hair stand up on end. She’d been referred to as a weapon many times in the facility, like she was an object or a means to an end, not a person. It was just another thing they called her to help themselves sleep at night, probably, to forget she was a little girl. 

“Weapon X was a failed human weapons program that ran from the late-1960’s to the mid-1970’s. Subject underwent the operation which successfully bonded adamantium to his skeleton while under their control. Was also extensively brainwashed during this period, which resulted in subsequent memory loss and amnesia. The details of the missions carried out by Howlett at this time are unknown. It is believed he was deployed in Vietnam for some time. Howlett was pardoned for crimes committed while under the control of Weapon X.”

Laura stops reading. 

She had assumed he had maybe killed someone before, had possibly even killed a lot of people. But she was under the impression it would’ve been by his own choice. The idea that he was just another pawn, like her, was something that had never crossed her mind. Laura’s reluctance to involve another family member in her bullshit was what had originally prompted her genius idea to hop on a bus to New York City. She thought her father was a stranger to the brainwashing, to being nothing more than an object in the eyes of others, to the whole nightmare that had been the facility. All this time she thought she was protecting him by being away from him, when it was too late to protect him at all. 

Her fantasies about a normal life and a family have just slipped through her fingers. Was this all that was meant for them? Did the whole world just view them as something to be exploited? The realization makes her stomach ache. She begins to wonder if the world can ever be safe with them in it. Horrible images flash through her mind of all the things Kimura could have them do. She wishes this weren't real, that she’d wake up any minute now back under the shrubs in Central Park. She shouldn’t have ever come here. She should have left it alone. Knowing was worse than not. 

Laura is taken from her thoughts by the sound of banging on the solid metal door behind her. When she’d broken in, it had locked automatically, triggering some kind of alarm. She turns to one of the many other monitors mounted on the wall, which display the date and time. It’s 2:52am, February 13th. 

Hastily, Laura scribbles the address of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters down onto her forearm. Tuning the banging out, she turns to the computer screens and shoves a clawed fist into every one of them, over and over, until they’re just husks of frayed wires and unrecognizable electronic parts, huffing and sparking their dying breaths. It hurts and her hands come away bloodied several times but she just tunes that out too. 


	2. Chapter 2

"Logan, did you—," the woman in the open doorway pauses, "Oh! I'm sorry. I was expecting someone else. Can I help you?"

"I heard this was a school. For mutants?”

The woman sticks her head out the door and peers behind Laura. 

"Are your parents here with you?"

Laura hesitates. Should she say she’s an orphan? Or perhaps that she’s run away from home? That’s not exactly an untruth. She did run away from somewhere.

"It's okay. I understand," she reassures her, before Laura has a chance to come up with something, "Come in."

She’d seen this woman just an hour ago through the window, holding back laughter, her red hair glinting under the bedroom lights. Her name was Rachel. Or Jean. Laura couldn’t tell them apart but it really didn’t matter. They had the same powers. She could expect the same threat level from both of them. 

Laura cautiously steps past her and into the school. From smell alone, she can tell the house has been standing for a long time. There are noises all around them, coming from all directions. Not just the noises of other people but from the house itself, the ancient bones of the place creaking and groaning under their weight. 

"Do you have any kind of identification with you?"

Laura opens the side pocket of her duffel bag, unfolds a stained piece of paper, and hands it to her. Jean or Rachel quickly scans the document with her eyes. Thankfully, the spot where her father's name should have been was left blank. 

"Great. This is a good start. It was smart of you to grab this before you left. Most kids don’t think of it or don’t have access to their own documents. So. What's your mutation?"

Laura looks around the room anxiously, her thoughts drifting away. On television, people had their own individual bedrooms, decorated with paint or wallpaper and filled with furniture. She wonders where Logan’s is. 

"You know what, it's alright. You don't have to tell me anything you're not ready to. We can deal with all of this in the morning. I'm sure you've had a long night," she smiles.

Laura just blinks back at her. 

Jean or Rachel beckons her up what Laura can assume is the main staircase. They walk down more endless halls and finally come to a stop in front of a heavy, wooden door. 

She sticks her head through the door and crooks her finger at the man inside. Laura recognizes Scott from the window and the files too. Cyclops, he’s called. He can’t control his mutation. That’s, apparently, what the glasses are for. 

Jean or Rachel asks Laura to wait there for her as she steps inside and shuts the door behind them. She can still hear their voices, even as they practically whisper to each other. 

“We have a new student.”

“This late?”

“I think she’s a runaway. She seems nervous, spaced out.”

“Right, I’ll get ‘Ro and we’ll start some paperwork. We’ll have to contact social services in the morning, first thing. Give her one of the spare rooms for tonight.”

“Okay,” there’s the sound of rustling and a noise Laura can’t place before the door opens again. 

“Alright, Laura, Scott will handle it from here. I’m sure you’re tired, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your room.”

Scott offers a small smile of acknowledgment as Jean or Rachel hands the birth certificate off to him. She places a gentle hand at the center of Laura’s back to guide her through the school. Laura tries not to cringe. 

“Just up those stairs and down that hall is my room. If you need anything tonight, anything at all, come and find me. Monday morning we’ll assign you a student liaison to show you to your classes. You’ll probably be assigned to Sooraya, who doesn’t have a roommate right now, but she’s a very sweet girl. I’m sure you’ll get along. Nine o’clock is curfew. Oh, and I don’t think I introduced myself. I’m Jean.”

She walks several paces ahead of Laura, her heartbeat and breathing steady. As if everything is perfectly fine. 

After a considerable amount of walking, they finally stop in a short hallway, covered in yellowing, floral wallpaper. She can’t hear anyone else in the rooms around her so it must be a secluded part of the house. Jean pulls an impressive ring of keys from her pocket. The lock clicks and the door swings open, revealing a rather modest and outdated room with a simple twin bed in the middle. 

"Down the hall is the bathroom. I'll put some new sheets on the bed for you and you can set your bag down."

Laura neatly places her bag in the corner of the room and slips her coat off, draping it over one of the wooden posts at the bottom corner of the bed. The cool air is a welcome feeling on her skin. 

“Alright,” Jean smooths the hideous, floral blanket down over the mattress, “There you are. Goodnight, Laura. If you need anything, please, come find me."

Laura nods obediently, taking her boots off, and making like she was about to lay down. Jean spares her one final glance before switching the light off and shutting the door with a soft click. 

* * *

Kurt dreads being paired with Bobby for chores. It takes twice the time to clean up and he’d rather just do it himself but he doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. He just suffers through it, accepting that he’ll be getting to bed late.  _ Pick your battles, _ he reminds himself. Taking an extra hour to do the dishes is not worth it. 

He flinches as Bobby claps both of his hands together, splashing soapy water all over the window and even the ceiling. 

“Oops, sorry, I didn’t think that would happen.”

“What time is class in the morning?” Kurt yawns. 

“Class? It’s Saturday, we don’t have—,” Bobby breaks off as they’re both startled by the sound of glass breaking. 

“What was that?”

“I think it was from the pantry? Logan’s always stacking stuff weird. Man’s a hundred and can’t put groceries away to save his life,” he laughs, drying his hands off on a dish towel before flicking the pantry light on. 

What used to be a bottle of orange soda is lying on the floor, cracked open and still gushing liquid. 

“It’s the soda,” he says as he bends down to pick the glass up, “Hey, look, the glass didn’t break completely. It’s just got a hole in it. Hold on, and I’ll clean this up.”

“Alright,” Kurt agrees, rubbing his eyes. Just two more dishes and he can go to sleep. He listens as Bobby pulls a rag from the drawer and returns to the pantry to clean up Logan’s mess. 

“Bobby, you’ll need to wet the rag, otherwise the floor will get sticky.”

He rinses the last two dishes quickly and sets them on the rack to dry, waiting for a reply. He huffs as he dries his hands off, scrubbing his face with the towel. He can barely keep his eyes open. 

“Bobby? Did you hear me?”

Kurt recoils as someone unexpectedly places their hands on his shoulder. No, wraps their arm around his neck and squeezes. Before he can even think to move, they’re grabbing a fistful of his hair and slamming his head against the kitchen counter.   


* * *

“Come on, ladies, keep up! Keep up!”

“How about you slow down, you big asshole!”

“Miss Summers, what a foul mouth you have,” Rogue gasps, stopping dramatically on the dirt track. Ever since the school opened, the running track has remained more or less the same. Short, made up of a powdery combination of dirt and sand, and tucked all the way at the bottom of the backyard. They could’ve paved it or done something fancy with it but Logan is the old-fashioned type and Scott doesn’t like to spend money where he doesn’t have to. 

She waits patiently for the other two women, giving them an opportunity to catch their breaths. 

“I think. I’ve popped. My lung,” Kitty heaves. 

“Why are you even surprised we can’t keep up? You have super-everything!”

“Well, I thought you’d be better running mates than Remy, at least. He just drags his feet the whole way.”

“I don’t blame him,” Rachel pants, “I prefer training with Logan to this. It’s still freezing!”

“Well, the cool air feels nice on your skin after a workout.”

“I think the AC feels even better,” Kitty laughs, running through the grass and between a copse of trees. Rogue and Logan have been bickering back and forth for the last two months about cutting them down. 

“I don’t like to mow around them,” he’d told her. 

“Yeah, well, I like the shade in the summertime,” she had countered. 

Kitty is pretty sure he’ll just come out here and do it while everyone is asleep. The first time she’d seen him mow the lawn in the dark felt almost as if she were seeing Bigfoot or a fly saucer. But that had been years ago and she’d grown used to hearing the leaf blower or the lawn mower starting up after dark by now. 

“It’s cooler at night,” he had explained to her. 

She suspected it was also easier for him to sleep during the day. 

Kitty doesn’t have a strong opinion about the trees either way. All she wants is to have a hot shower and fall into a nice, warm bed. She makes her way to the back door as fast as she can without tripping over her own feet. 

“Kitty?” Rachel calls from somewhere behind her. 

“Over here!” 

She stops walking, waiting for a reply, but continues up the hill when she hears nothing else. She nearly screams when she turns her head and notices a small figure crouched just ahead of her. She pauses before making any rash decisions. You can’t make clear decisions when you’re afraid. She’d learned that long ago. 

As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she realizes she’s looking at a little girl. It’s  _ way _ past curfew. She sighs, her heartbeat still in her throat. She’s going to kill them, whoever they are.

“Hey,” she begins, bounding over to them. The figure doesn’t move. 

“Hello?” She tries again. Nothing. As she comes to stand over them, she realizes they’re holding their hand awkwardly. 

“Why are you holding your hand like that? It’s past curfew, you shouldn’t be out here. Imagine if Scott or Logan caught you up?”

“Don’t tell them,” she says, turning her head. It’s certainly the voice of a child but it sounds off. Her tone is flat, almost forced. Kitty doesn’t know why but her gut is telling her something about this situation isn't adding up. 

“Come on, up,” Kitty says, dragging the girl up by the collar. She’s surprised to find she’s holding onto a tank top instead of a jacket or at least a long sleeve shirt. 

“It’s freezing out here, why haven’t you got a coat on?”

“Kitty?” Rogue sing-songs. 

Kitty ignores her, so she can focus on examining the girl's injury. 

“I don’t see anything. What did you do? Bruise it? What grade are you in, again? I’m sorry, I don’t remember having you in my class.”

“I don’t know. I’m new.”

“Oh, okay. Then what grade will you be in this year?”

“I don’t know, I told you. I’m new.”

“You don’t know what—,” she pauses as Rachel interrupts her by calling her name again. 

“Hold on!” Kitty shouts, before turning her attention back to the girl, “You don’t know what grade you’ll be in? What grade were you in before?”

The girl shrugs. Her skin is so warm, it’s like she’s running a fever.

Kitty drops her hand suddenly, taking a step back. As she does, the light shifts, and the girls pupils look like they’re glowing. Kitty knows that, in reality, it’s just the light reflecting off of the back of her eyes; they’re not actually emitting light of their own. Logan’s eyes do the same thing. 

“Katherine Pryde! Where the hell are you?” Rogue shouts again. 

Kitty turns, about to call out to the both of them. Something about this girl is strange. She’d feel better if she had some back up. But when she turns her back to the girl, she brings her elbows down hard on top of Kitty’s skull. 

Before she falls, Laura seizes her by the coat, setting her down gently, so she won’t crack her head open. 

“Over here,” she yells, sinking back into the brush and watching as Rogue tramples through the grass towards her. 

Once they’re separated, stumbling around in the dark, it’s easy to pick them off. 

She takes a log up into one of the trees and drops it on Rogue’s head. 

She opts to choke Rachel. She’s not as physically strong as Rogue, so she isn’t able to break Laura’s grip. She imagines that Rachel tries to sneak into her mind and stop her but the lack of oxygen scrambles her brain. She needs concentration to use her mutation. It only takes a few seconds for her to reluctantly go limp in Laura’s hands. 

* * *

After she ties the two from the kitchen and three from outside up, sticking them in a closet and an outdoor shed respectively, she returns to her dorm room. No one else seems to be awake. She’d checked. 

With nothing else for her to do, she stands up and walks around her room in the pitch black, feeling nosey. 

She finds a copy of  _ On the Origin of Species _ and a few dust bunnies in the bedside table. There’s a stack of sheets, pillowcases, an extra blanket, and some old, plastic hangers inside the closet and nothing else. The floor underneath the bed is also bare, save for a few layers of dust. She'd be more likely to have an asthma attack than to find anything interesting in here.

Unzipping the bag she’d left in the corner, she wraps her hand around the silver locket and chain her cousin had given her the last time she’d seen them and slips it around her neck. She spares a few thoughts for them, while crouched on the floor, trying not to choke on the dust and something else. Some abundant feeling inside her chest that made her feel like a burst pipe. They’ll likely never know what happened to her. She wonders if it’s for better or worse; if it’s the best thing she could do for them or if it will only hurt them more. 

The one window in her dorm looks out onto the vast backyard of the school. She can just barely see the glittering water of a lake at the edge of the property. It’s called Breakstone Lake. It will kill her with far gentler hands than anyone else has ever tried. It will be merciful. Not just for herself, but for her father too. 

This will hurt the X-Men— she’s not delusional enough to think it won’t— but it’ll hurt less than anything else that could happen if she lets them live. 

She crawls back up into bed in defeat and sits still for what seems like hours. The silence fills her ears like the steady beat of a drum. 

Finally, as she starts to wonder what she’ll do if Logan doesn’t return, the whirring of approaching helicopter blades cuts through the quiet. Moments later the trees begin swaying violently and a bright, white light is cast over the lawn. She watches the helicopter land some distance away and a single figure step out onto the grass. Just as quickly as it lands, it is gone, leaving the figure all alone in the still darkness. 

All she can think as she watches him is that her mother really must not have used much of her own DNA when she’d created Laura. She deflates at the thought.

She presses her ear to the glass as he approaches the back door. The heels of his boots click against the concrete in time with his steps. The lock clicks, the knob turns, and the door shuts as he steps inside. 

Laura goes deathly still before springing for the door all at once, vaulting over the bed to turn the handle and tear out of the room, doing her best to remember her way downstairs amongst the endless halls and wooden doors that all looked the same.

Sure enough she manages to catch him just as he climbs the stairs and disappears down the dark hallway she’d been shown hours before. Every line in his body looks fatigued but he doesn’t smell like sweat or blood, like he’d been in a fight. She hesitates to follow him. She'd prefer for him to be in bed before doing anything, so she waits in the hall, crouched in the corner, the ticking of a nearby clock nearly driving her insane. 

She can’t wait any longer. Surely she’s given him enough time to settle down. Her legs feel stiff and wooden as she starts up the stairs, taking care to avoid the creaky boards. 

The further into the hall she gets, the stronger his scent becomes. It lingers briefly in front of an open doorway, so she peers inside. 

She finds it empty, despite it looking like someone  _ did _ live there. She steps inside the room tentatively, careful not to trip over the clothes and things littering the floor, and stops at the sight of his boots in a pile beside his bed. Huh. Why were his  _ boots _ here when  _ he _ wasn’t?

Her hair stands on end. Is she going to be ambushed? Could he possibly know she’s here? She whips back around and sniffs the air, feeling more alert now. His scent was still coming from a room a few doors down and it’s stronger there. The door is shut, so she presses her ear to it softly. There is the faint sound of snoring inside and nothing else. As quietly as possible, she twists the doorknob. 

In the center of the room is a massive bed, bigger than any she'd seen before. Laura can make out three bodies. One is her father, the other is Jean, and the final one is Scott, wearing glasses in his sleep. In different circumstances, she might have laughed. 

As she raises her fist and approaches the bed, Jean wakes with a start and the bedside lamp comes on suddenly, without being touched. Laura trips backwards into the wall adjacent to their bed. 

“Laura? Is everything alright?”

Her father rouses from beside Jean and mumbles something, before waking in a sort of panic. Scott startles too, moving a hand over his face to block the light, even though he has glasses on. 

“What is going on?” He says, “It’s past curfew.”

“What the hell,” Logan has the decency to at least be embarrassed and pull his blanket over his bare chest. 

Why was her father in their room, in bed, with the two of them? She feels like she’s walked in on something she shouldn’t have. 

Laura pushes her thoughts aside and unsheathes her claws. It doesn’t really matter, does it? He should have slept in his own room. Nothing to do about it now. 

Faster than she’d ever moved before, she leaps onto the bed and plunges her claws into Logan’s chest. She finds that she meets some resistance. So the files had been correct. Her claws scrape past the adamantium and tear into the flesh around it. 

He begins spitting out blood immediately, a funny look on his face. Laura can’t tell if it’s terror or confusion or both. It’s strange to see a face so like her own, not in the mirror or as a reflection, but right in front of her own eyes. Even stranger to see it choking on his own blood. 

Jean and Scott scream and try to pull Laura off of him, but they aren’t strong enough to pry her away, not with her claws hooked in between his ribs. They step away from her, seemingly giving up, until she feels herself lifted into the air and thrown back into the wall. She collapses onto their dresser, knocking things off of it as she tumbles to the floor. 

She bounces back quickly, but the trio is already in front of her and out the door. Even with his chest cut open he's a fast fucker. They must’ve had lots of practice running away.

Logan pushes Jean and Scott into a room across from theirs, forcing it closed and pulling the door shut. He turns back around to face her. 

“What are you doing here?”

“Were you expecting me?” 

She levels her gaze at him. Jean and Scott are banging their fists on the door behind him, pleading with him to open it. 

If by some chance he’d known about her all these years and had done nothing, she was going to kill him miserably and slowly. 

Another voice comes from the bottom of the staircase before he can explain himself, calling up to them. 

“Don’t,” Logan warns. 

“Tell him not to come up.”

“Remy, stay downstairs,” he calls out. 

After a few small noises of confusion and protest, she hears his footsteps on the stairs. Laura wastes no time in planting her fist in Logan’s stomach. He gargles more blood and slips down onto his knees, unable to hold himself up any longer. He releases the door handle as he slides to the floor. 

“Holy shit,” Gambit inhales sharply on the top step. The bedroom door swings wide open and Scott and Jean spill out into the hall. Before she can stab him again, a flash of red light blinds her and she’s thrown back, skidding to a stop at the top of the stairs. 

Gambit is crouched on the floor, now standing between herself and her father, having gotten the memo way before her. Cyclops stands where she had been just before, readjusting his glasses. She can hear her father coughing and inhaling labored, shallow breaths, still on his hands and knees. Fighting all of them at once will be difficult. Not ideal, and not at all what she wanted, but by now she’d learned her luck was nonexistent and to prepare for things not to go her way. 

“Is everything alright?” Gambit inquires calmly. He glances at Logan, who he can no doubt barely see in the darkness, and then back to Laura again. She can see the gears turning in his head as the realization dawns on him. 

“Let me explain,” Logan heaves. 

The files are correct again. His healing process has been impeded by the adamantium. 

“I knew it! I knew you had more kids.”

"Shut up,” he snaps, “She’s my clone, technically, but she doesn’t share all of my DNA.”

“Logan. That’s just a long and drawn out way to say that this is your child!”

The group jumps as Laura slams her fist down on the top step. Logan frantically reaches a hand out to pull Scott and Jean behind him. 

"You knew about me?” She demands, "If you knew all these years why didn't you ever do anything?" 

How could he stand in front of his stupid friends as if he were going to protect them when he couldn't even protect his own clone? If he'd known about her then where had he been all these years when she needed a parent to take some responsibility and actually take care of her? 

"Kid," he warns, "I didn't know about you until about two weeks ago. I heard about your encounter with S.H.I.E.L.D., but I didn’t know you were my— my daughter until tonight."

"Someone better explain what’s going on," Scott steps forward again, “What encounter with S.H.I.E.L.D?”

"You’ve heard about all that shit going on in New York on the news. Matt called me to tell me that Nick had asked him to investigate and that when they ran DNA found at the first crime scene through the system I came up as a match.”

“But you haven’t been in New York, Logan. You’ve been here.”

“I know. That’s why he called. He thought I should know that I had a relative running around, possibly killing people. Nick confirmed that she was technically my child tonight. I didn’t believe Matt when he called because I didn’t think I had any more kids. I didn’t want to get everyone worked up in case it turned out to be nothing.”

“Oh, like you’ve been so diligent about using contraception,” Remy rolls his eyes.

“Hey, I was out of my mind when I came out of Weapon X! That’s not got shit to do with it! Fury contacted me to tell me someone had broken into S.H.I.E.L.D. and accessed some files. It wasn’t a courtesy call to let me know I had a daughter. It was a warning."

"What files?"

"Ours," he glances at Laura expectantly.

“Why does S.H.I.E.L.D. have files on us?” Jean blurts.

"Why would  _ you _ want them," Cyclops turns to her. 

“She just stabbed me, she killed all those people in New York; I think it’s pretty fucking obvious what she wants to do!”

“They deserved it,” she hisses, “And you do too!”

“Why?” Remy shrugs, “We haven’t done anything to you?”

“Oh, Laura, you don’t have to do this,” Jean interjects. 

Gambit, Cyclops, and Logan turn to face her, turn at the tone in her voice. It sounds out of place for the situation, borders on sympathetic, like Laura hadn’t just torn a hole in her father's stomach. There’s something in that tone that tells Laura she already knew everything. She wishes she could explain herself but she doesn’t have the words to. And even if she did, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the facts. 

The truth, all they needed to know, was very simple, "We have to die. No more killing, no more of this."

"What?" 

Logan seems confused, as if she'd surprised him again. 

"This is just between you and me. I don’t care about your friends,” she tells him, understanding just what he thought of her. She tries not to let it sting. It won’t matter. She just has to get on with it. 

"Woah, woah, let's hold our horses! Surely we don’t have to jump straight to killing anybody just yet. Let’s weigh all our options," Gambit holds his hands out in front of him, as if to say he wasn’t a threat. Laura knows better. 

"They won’t ever stop. They won’t stop looking for us, they won’t stop using the trigger scent. You should have known. This is the only way."

"The what?" 

"What?" 

Now she was confused. Logan just makes a face at her. What did he mean? She thought she'd been pretty clear.

“Jeanie, I think you ought to let our Kitty know that we gonna need some help. Now.”

“Don’t bother. Kitty’s sleeping,” Laura says simply. 

“What the fuck did you do to her?” Logan points an accusing finger at her. 

“Worry about yourself. She’s alive. You’re not going to be.”

“Fuck it, I’ll get Emma,” Gambit shouts, starting down the hall. 

“Emma? For what?”

“She’s a psychic with the ability to communicate with people on a global scale! Put two an’ two together, Scott!”

“No!” Laura shouts, starting after him, but Logan stops her. 

“You came for me, not them,” he says. 

“Logan, honey,” Jean warns. Laura feels her claws sliding out of their place.

This time, when she swipes at him, he brings his own claws up to stop them. 

“Go! I’ll be okay!” 

Before Jean can protest any further Cyclops is dragging her down the hall after Gambit. Laura nervously watches them disappear around the corner, her claws scraping against her father’s with a shrill, terrible noise. 

“You don’t have to do this,” he bargains. 

“Yes,” she raises her leg between the two of them, placing her foot against his sternum, “I do!”

She unsheathes the claw in her foot and kicks him to the floor. He gasps, blood bubbling up from his throat. She’s probably nicked his lung. It’ll be awhile before he can catch his breath. 

She leaps over him, scrambling around the corner, and is confronted with another, longer hallway. Fuck this school for being so gigantic and fuck the people who built the place for making everything look the same! Panic rushes through her as she realizes her window of opportunity to get this over with is closing in on her and  _ fast _ . 

“Piotr! Emma! ‘Ro!” Jean calls out to the other X-Men from further down the hall.

As she follows the sound of her voice she picks up Gambit’s scent in front of an open doorway. Inside is an icy blue room with dark wood furniture and a blonde haired woman sitting up in bed, looking as if she’s just been woken up. Gambit is beside her, arguing with her animatedly. 

“Emma— oh fuck!” 

She leaps over the bed, fully prepared to knock Emma unconscious but, without warning, her skin goes shiny and translucent like gossamer. Her hand crumples horribly as it makes contact with Emma’s face. She doesn’t scream, she’s proud to say, but she does face plant directly onto the mattress. 

“What in God’s name!” She gasps, as she’s dragged out of bed. Laura grunts in frustration. She’s had enough of the fucking X-Men!

She clambers off the bed, boots getting tangled in Emma’s ridiculous covers, and blocks the door. Emma’s skin returns to normal briefly, and Gambit moves to stand in front of her, his eyes glowing like a kind of warning. Emma’s own eyes flash, going white for a fraction of a second and, then, her skin is back to being strange and translucent. 

“Who’d ya call?”

“Who would you call for backup if Logan had woken up one day as a murderous, teenaged girl?”

“Uh,” he hesitates, “Everybody who could get here in a reasonable amount of time?”

“Smart man,” she says, before turning to Laura, “It’s too late, darling. Might as well give it up. It’ll only be a minute now.”

“I don’t need that long,” she spits, darting back out the door. 

She runs straight into Logan as she does. 

“Laura,” he places his hands on her shoulders. She does  _ not _ have time for this. 

She lunges at him, pushing off on the floor, and sends them both crashing through the window across from Emma’s room. 

She hits the ground outside hard, rolling to absorb some of the force and to avoid the sheets of glass raining down on them. Laura is up on her feet by the time he’s processed anything. 

He struggles to escape her grasp as she plunges her claws into him once again; the blood loss quickly makes him uncoordinated and weak. 

“Why— are you,” he breaks off in a fit of wet coughing. 

“I told you! I’d rather us die than be used again! So that’s what we’re going to do!”

She digs her claws in, making more of a mess than anything. He’s already injured beyond the point of being able to fight her off. She’d be lying if she said things weren’t personal, that she didn’t feel a little bit of satisfaction getting to hurt him back for being so callous in the hall. All her thoughts about a peaceful, merciful death have literally just been thrown out the window. 

“You won’t. Too many,” he garbles cryptically, blood pouring down his chin. 

She hastily drags him across the yard, claws still hooked in him. He’s heavy, even heavier than he looks, and he struggles, clumsily trying to stab out at her. He’s got three claws, all between his knuckles, and none in his feet. In a lot of ways, he feels like the older, obsolete version of herself. 

She throws him onto the shore of Breakstone Lake with every last scrap of energy she has. He's still fighting her when she jumps on top of him and pushes his head underwater, but with his body weight and hers working against him it’s useless. 

She pushes them out further and further, hanging onto him so that they’ll both be submerged. She tries not to resurface but her instincts get the best of her and she panics. Logan is holding onto her, holding her down, struggling too. He’s starting to scratch her blindly in his desperation, pulling on her shirt as if he could use it to hoist himself up out of the water. She kicks out, claws popping out and then back in as she struggles to think with fear and panic and the need for air bogging her down. She feels her heartbeat slow and her vision fading and she thinks this is it. The mission is over. 

That is, until, something grabs the back of her shirt and hoists her out of the lake. 

When she finally catches her breath and opens her eyes she's staring at two people, a man and a woman with black hair. She can’t remember who they’re supposed to be. She must have come across them. She’d spent a long time trying to memorize all of their names and powers. But there were just so many of them and her brain felt heavy with lack of oxygen. 

“Drop her,” someone shouts up at them. 

“Are you sure?” 

They have pleasant accents. Similar voices and similar faces too. 

Laura kicks out at them, suddenly understanding what they’re trying to do.

“Oh!” The woman lets her go, jerking her hand away as she narrowly avoids being stabbed. 

The man swings her back and forth in the air to gain some momentum before dropping her too. She hits several tree branches as she plummets to the ground, creating little gaps in the forest canopy above her where the tree limbs have literally broken her fall. 

She’s definitely broken something herself, she decides, as she attempts to slide up into a sitting position. She falters, her ribs and shoulders screaming in protest. Even as she hears people trampling through the woods, looking for her, she can’t find the energy to pick herself up. 

She possibly loses consciousness, or maybe just forgets a chunk of time, but when she becomes alert again she feels better. Physically, at least. 

She finds them again at the front of the school. It appears the X-Men have dragged Logan there, all the way from the lake, to put some distance between him and the body of water. 

The wound in the center of his chest is dark and gaping. The smell of his blood hangs heavy in the air, even from her spot tucked away in the woods. 

She remembers now that the two identical people from earlier are called Northstar and Aurora. They were on a Canadian team with her father once upon a time. They’re standing amongst the crowd of people gathered around him. 

“It is not just the one girl we are after? There are more, surely?” 

Northstar seems confused. They  _ all _ seem confused. Emma’s call for help must have left a lot to the imagination. 

“Yes, Northstar, it’s just the one girl. As you may be able to tell, she’s very skilled. It’s Logan she’s after but do try not to get too close,” Storm tells him. 

“Just Logan? But he can not be killed! Not by a little girl?! Don’t you think this is a bit of an overreaction, to send us all out here?”

“He is hard to kill, yes, but nothing is impossible,” Aurora points out from beside him. 

They must be clones too, by the looks of it.

“No, no, you must explain this to us. Who is she? Why is she here?” Northstar insists. 

Logan jerks up from his place on the concrete, blood pouring down his sides. He has no shirt on but the top of his pants are soaked through. He’s healed but to say he’s bounced back would be an overstatement. 

“Do we really have the time for this?” he groans. 

Northstar makes a show of looking around, “Do you see anyone? I think we have time.”

“I’d have to agree. We have to know what we’re doing,” Domino cocks her head, hair bouncing as she does.

“All you need to know is that this girl has my mutation. Healing and the claws. She’s mad, she claims she’s not here to hurt anyone but me but…,” he trails off. 

“You don’t buy it?”

“No. I don’t.”

“She had plenty of opportunity to hurt us all night, Logan, and she didn’t. I think she’s earnest.” 

“ _ Earnest? _ Yeah, earnestly trying to kill him. You saw her, Jeanie. She just kept stabbing him, over an’ over. I think she might be enjoyin’ this, just a little,” Gambit drawls. 

“Also, for the record, she did hurt us,” Iceman interjects, “She knocked me out!”

“And when you catch this girl, what do you plan to do? How are we to restrain someone with adamantium implants?”

“I could pin her down,” Polaris suggests. Her mutation is metal manipulation. She’s one to avoid. 

“She’d tear her own claws out to get free. And she’d just grow the bone back.”

“Oh, gross,” Rictor frowns. He’s named after the scale used to measure the intensity of an earthquake. Laura doesn’t know exactly what an earthquake is but she read online that it’s when the ground shakes. 

“Hello? Telepath here? Or have you forgotten? No need to restrain her,” Emma shrugs cheekily. 

“No,” Jean blurts.

“Why not?”

“She’s been controlled all her life, she’d never forgive us if we did the exact same thing.”

“Forgive  _ us?  _ Darling Jean, has it escaped your mind that  _ she _ broke into  _ our _ home and tried to kill one of our staff?”

“I  _ know _ what she was trying to do. She—,” Jean pauses. She frowns, shaking her head before continuing, “If we were willing to offer Logan a place to stay, it’s only fair we do the same for her. She’s no more a danger to us than he was.”

“A place to stay?!”

“Yes! She’s a fourteen year old girl! Our job is to protect mutants, or have  _ you _ forgotten that? She may not know it now, but she needs our help and if she’s ever going to accept it she can’t see us as people who would make her do something against her will. She has to be able to trust us. No mind control. Ever.”

“Y’all can’t be serious? Listen, I understand this is Logan’s child, but we met Logan when he was quite a bit older. He had plenty of time to do his calming down by then. Thanks to his indestructible genetic code his kids are just like him. Maybe we ought to give it a couple… years… before we extend an olive branch?”

“I see why they made you sex-ed teacher, Remy, you’re a real natural at this shit,” Logan growls. 

“Well, no offense! But it’s the truth. Looked just like you when she was trying to stab you to death.”

Logan just flips him off, which earns some laughter from the group. Laura is taken aback by how nonchalant they all are. She’d just tried to kill one of their friends. Had almost succeeded. Why were they all so calm? 

“Very well. No mind control. But don’t worry, I’m versatile. I think we can figure something else out,” Emma winks. Jean is quiet for a while, making a range of facial expressions that Laura can’t decipher. 

“Well, if everyone’s questions are answered, let’s spread out and get this over with,” Cyclops tells them. 

Northstar and Aurora fly off in one direction, while Domino takes her group in the other, and Nightcrawler disappears in a cloud of smoke with the final group. Emma, Cyclops, Jean, and Storm remain seated with her father at the edge of the fountain. Laura holds her breath in anticipation. 

Are they really going to leave him here, with just a handful of mutants to protect him?

It’s now or never, she decides as she breaks through the trees, running up the hill toward the driveway. When she’s halfway there, they look up, noticing her presence. She pauses as the wind shifts and she catches the scent of someone else. There’s no one else around that she can see but the smell is unmistakable. She almost starts forward again until Jean and Emma do something strange with their eyes, and a woman with long, dark hair and a glowing knife appears out of thin air. 

“Surprise,” she says, lunging at Laura. 

Psylocke. She has psychic powers too. But Laura can’t remember anything about her being able to  _ disappear _ . 

As Laura tries to make sense of the situation, Psylocke lands a well placed kick to her chest and she hits the ground hard. She has to put any confusion or questions on the back burner. If she doesn’t focus this woman is going to beat the hell out of her. 

Psylocke throws several punches, kicking out at Laura again, and swinging the knife at her too. Laura dodges them with ease now that she has her full attention on the fight. 

“Smart girl. Fast too! You must be well trained,” she tells her. 

Laura, not exactly known for her conversational skills, just frowns. She inches closer to Psylocke with each attack she avoids, ducking and dodging like she’d been taught. Psylocke is fast herself and obviously knows how to fight too. They’re pretty much at a draw until, finally, Laura inches close enough to wrap her legs around Psylocke’s waist and grab the hand with the sword in her own hands. She flips them, rolling to the ground so that Psylocke is lying on her stomach with her sword hand twisted at an uncomfortable angle. 

The scent of something sweet abruptly wafts through the air as Laura leans over her. It’s a sugary smell, like vanilla? Or cake? Then, she feels someone slip an arm around her neck and drag her off of Psylocke. They loop their legs around Laura, pinning her in place. 

“Unlucky you,” Domino says against her ear, voice unmistakable, her curly hair tickling Laura’s face. Her instinct is to panic because this lady is  _ way _ too close but she knows fear will only make her dumb.

She reaches around, tries to land a punch, but it's useless at the current angle. Her legs are mostly free, though, so she bends forward and allows her claw to spring forth with her foot inches from Domino’s face. 

Domino lurches, like she’s surprised, and places her feet flat against Laura’s back to kick her away. They’d forgotten, or just didn’t know, about the claws in her feet. 

Stumbling in the grass but happy to be free she catches herself, straightening up. She can see the rest of the X-Men now. They’re right where they’d been before. So it was a trick. She should have waited. She just didn’t think she had the time to. 

“Dom!” Rictor shouts, running forward. The blonde girl, who’d also been with their group, is right behind him.They stretch their hands out in front of themselves at the same time.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Gambit warns but it’s too late. 

Rictor shoots some kind of wave at her, the air going blurry like when heat rises up off of hot pavement, just as the blonde produces a pile of shiny, glowing marbles from her hands and chucks them in her direction. The wave knocks her backwards but it also throws the marbles away from her. 

She falls back into someone, probably Gambit, and they hit the ground. 

She rolls off of him quickly, bits of dirt and grass raining down on her from the explosion. He groans. She laughs, thinking she may have elbowed him in the ribs. 

As she rolls over, she realizes they’ve just thrown her right at Logan’s feet. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second as she looks up at him. Then, she lunges, sending herself and her father both into the fountain. 

The water turns pink quickly, blood flowing from Logan’s pants and chest in billows. He struggles, spluttering desperately, and reaches out to scratch her face and arms. She leans her head back, out of the way, and continues to hold him down, counting down the seconds. Fifty three, fifty four, fifty five, fifty six. Any minute now.

Numerous different hands— some blue, some metal, some gloved— wrap around her forearms and torso, dragging her off of her father in unison. More hands grab her legs and feet and Laura realizes the stupid fucking X-Men are working together instead of trying to take her on in small groups. 

She kicks out, or tries, but finds her limbs pinned in place. So she surges forward, hard enough that her shoulder feels like it might pop out of place, and when it doesn’t work she tries it again. She even strikes out with her own head, hoping to hit someone with it. She just ends up knocking herself out against a cool, solid body, a body whose skin does not feel like skin. Kimura, she thinks for a moment, before remembering where she is. No. Probably Colossus. The hands pin her gracelessly to the ground as she regains consciousness. 

She yelps, without meaning to, reaching out for something to pull herself up with. There’s nothing to grab but the air. She can barely move her legs for all of the people holding them down. 

This is it, she thinks, she’s going to die. They’re going to kill her. It doesn’t make much sense. Kill her? How? By sitting on her? But her brain insists loudly that it’ll happen anyways, even if it doesn’t know how or why. 

When she looks up at the group, their faces have all blended together, ghoulish, terrible and unrecognizable. There are so many of them. 

Laura’s never been afraid of fighting so many people. Most of her missions involved her fighting several people at once, usually grown men, and usually armed. She’d cut through every one of them, every time. This is different. She can’t stop them. She is out of her element. She wishes she’d never come here. 

“Stop it,” a sharp voice rings out inside her head. It’s like a needle to the brain. Everyone must have heard it, because they all stop too. The pressure on her legs lets up and the hands around her arms loosen. 

Her chest heaves with quick coming breaths and the blood on her face has dried and grown tacky and uncomfortable. There’s dirt crumbling off her palms and under her nails. She must have been clawing at the ground. Who knows. It all feels like a blur. 

“Laura Kinney, I think it’s best if you calm down,” the voice says. It’s less piercing this time. 

She pants and obeys, nervously eyeing her father from his place at the edge of the fountain. As he finishes coughing up water he catches her eye. He looks mad. That’s fair, she thinks. 

“Is this really your genius plan? God, if you’re going to kill me be a little quicker about it,” Logan barks, resting his elbows on his knees. 

“Logan,” Emma warns. 

“No,” he holds a finger up at her, “This is my motherfucking child, I’ll talk to her if I want to. Laura, you’ve lost your fucking head if you think killing me will solve all our problems. If we’re corpses, who’s to stop them from digging our bodies up and taking our DNA then?”

“Maybe your stupid fucking friends can do it.” 

“Which one of these assholes looks like they’re going to stand watch beside our graves until the end of motherfucking time, Laura!?”

“Have us cremated!”

“I can’t be fucking cremated! It doesn’t matter if I could! You left your DNA at that goddamn crime scene in New York and now S.H.I.E.L.D. has it! And who knows how many people have my DNA or my son’s!”

Laura flinches. 

“You have a son?”

“Logan,” Cyclops sighs. 

“Oh, what? Remy is right. Both of my children are homicidal fucking maniacs! I’m sure they’ll get along just fine!”

“And you’re not?”

“What the fuck would you know about me?”

“I know about Vietnam! I know about Weapon X! What crimes did you have to be pardoned for? Or do you even remember them?”

“What did you just say,” he steps up off the ledge, moving towards her. Laura springs to her feet, ready for another fight, but Jean steps between them. 

“Stop it! Don’t talk to each other like that!”

“Does anyone hear that?” Someone asks from the crowd, suddenly. Logan nods. Laura hears it’s too. A dull, whirring noise. 

“Helicopters. They’re close to the ground.”

“Oh goddammit, it’s that stupid motherfucker. Laura, it’s time for you to go.”

She unsheathes her claws as a warning as he strides toward her. He stops, getting the message loud and clear. He’s too close. 

“That helicopter has Nick Fury on it! The director of S.H.I.E.L.D. He knew you’d come here. I think that’s why he warned me about you. Might’ve been waiting for you all night, the slimy son of a bitch. S.H.I.E.L.D, Weapon X, they’re all the same. They just want an opportunity to use us. And you’ve handed it to them on a silver fucking platter.”

“He’s one man. I’ll take care of him.”

“Laura, if you kill the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. everyone will know a mutant was responsible for his death. They’ll look into the school, and it will endanger the lives of mutants here and everywhere,” Scott steps between them diplomatically, “You have a right to be angry. You both do. But we can’t give them any more reasons to hate us.”

Laura looks between the two of them, deliberating on what she should do. She could kill this Nick Fury. She would, but she doesn’t want random mutants to suffer for her actions. She backs away, eyes on the approaching helicopter.

“Go!” Logan says forcefully, urging her. 

Laura shoots him a mean look, but doesn’t say anything. This isn’t over. 

“Yeah, I know,” he shouts over the whir of helicopter blades. 

Laura turns, appeased by the acknowledgement in his words. Good. As long as he knows. 

The forest is dense and without any light, even as the glaring sun rises, red and angry, over the horizon. She darts between the shivering, dew-wet branches and is lost in darkness and distance. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The main point of this fix it is that I felt it was obligatory for me to address the problems I have with Laura’s comic origin before writing anything else about her. The idea of taking a female character that had agency and freely expressed her anger only to erase that and subject her to further abuse when adapting her for comics is particularly sinister to me. Now that this is out there in the world I can scrub it all from my mind and be at peace.  
> I wanted to keep the ballsy X-Men: Evo origin where she dead ass beats up all the X-Men (legendary) but of course changed a few things to make it make sense for the main universe. I also made an effort to cut down on Laura’s dialogue because I like her to be portrayed as the silent type. One /can/ have little dialogue w/o it stripping their agency completely. Marvel. Takes notes, hoe.  
> I did not intend to take a month to update this fic. I really didn’t. I had the second chapter totally finished before I posted the first but I came back to it, hated it, and rewrote it three hundred times. I hope this adds something new to her origin and that the writing doesn’t feel disjointed thanks to my indecisiveness.  
> Anyways, there’s a lot more to cover but I’d bitch all day if you let me and I’m not trying to do that. If you’d like more specifics I do unfortunately have a tumblr @uncannyxmns! Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve thrown canon to the wind. Laura comics origin story BAD. Laura X-Men: Evo origin story GOOD. Not to just throw it under the rug, but the topic DO BE making me constantly uncomfortable. NYX never happened. It literally does not exist in my mind.  
> Anyways, Laura is dealing with lots of conflicting thoughts and guilt. Feeling like there was something you should have done to escape your situation (even if you were a child and had nowhere to go) and missing the familiarity of the abusive environment once you’ve left are common. She’s still a child as well, so there will be lots of things she can’t quite understand or explain. Hence why she blames herself several times over the course of this fic.  
> Also, changed some stuff about Logan’s backstory because the whole Romulus has been pulling the strings and it’s all one big conspiracy and Logan was born on a plantation to rich parents has never jived with me. Made Logan the groundskeeper too because he’s a literal amnesiac and the fact they have him teaching history when he went to school in the actual 1800s and can not remember shit makes no sense to me.


End file.
